Tag: Music

Art

Lets play more shows please!

The best part about loading out after last Sunday’s show was knowing that we have another show just around the corner!  This time it is with a fellow local Ithaca band, Powder the Moon, featuring music by our good friend, Gabe Tavares. For anyone interested, you can listen to his music here: https://www.facebook.com/GabeTavares/app_2405167945

Having a show to look forward to on the calendar makes my days leading up to it feel so sweet 🙂

At our last show, my camera died while were playing, so hopefully I will get some good video from this one to share!

the rungs @ lot ten

Live, Music

That feeling you get when you’re performing..

I really used to think that playing music at home in the privacy of my comfortable room was the best feeling ever.  If you met me just two years ago, I probably wouldn’t even admit that I played music and not ever would I want to do it in front of anybody!  But now we have a show coming up this Sunday at the Chapter House in Ithaca NY,  and a cannot wait to play on stage.  I love hearing our music wildly fill the air  in a large dimly lit room  and I love how fast the songs seem to fly by in front of a crowd.   It makes me so happy when my friends come to support us and I  literally feel butterflies when  I meet new people who enjoy what they hear.

At some point between two years ago and now, I realized my fear of playing live stemmed from self-consciousness about the possibility of making mistakes, or making a fool out of myself in front of others.  One day something hit me on the head and I thought, “Wait a minute, why should I deprive myself of a new experience because of fear of what others might think?!?  That is the dumbest thing ever!” Today I believe sharing songs through live performance is one of the most rewarding facets of  being a musician.

If any new musicians out there who haven’t yet played for an audience read this,  I encourage you to go to an open mic or book a show!   If you’re waiting for the right time or the perfect song or the best crowd,  throw those notions out the window! That feeling you get when you’re performing will be worth it.   🙂

Lyrics

Writing Lyrics: Be a sponge!

So genius could strike at any moment, or a light bulb can suddenly flash on in your head, but don’t just wait for the ideas to come. Seek out inspiration, listen to everything around you, be a sponge and soak it all in! Sometimes inspiration can come from the funniest things. Like at work in meetings, on the bus talking to a stranger, waiting in line at the grocery store, the list goes on and on. I love it when my friends use silly expressions and cheesy metaphors because it gets my mind spinning with words. Be a sponge all day long and you’ll fall in love with the littlest things! 🙂

Lyrics

Writing Lyrics: Expressing past memories and emotions

I remember getting out of  elementary school in the early afternoon and bolting out on my bike to ride around the neighborhood with my friends. Our 3 little blocks seemed like an endless world of grasshoppers and lizards and perfectly branched climbing trees. We defined our surroundings by a combination of limited knowledge and our Disney influenced imaginations. A haunted house at the end of a long driveway, a hole in the ground that we tirelessly dug to China, the Creek where pirates had once been who we sent bottled messages to, and the sky fort in my backyard that transformed from a ship on the sea into a castle on an island into an airplane in the sky.

Now I’ve gone back there a few times over the past five years. Walking the entire neighborhood in a short 20 min, I recalled strong emotions of adventure, fear and excitement that were once triggered by childhood fantasies. Have I lost this ability to create new dimensions? Have I acquired enough knowledge to scientifically understand everything in front of me and closed in on the gaps that used to be filled with make-believe? Or could I be suppressing a playfulness that is not a social norm in the workplace adult world? I remember this empowering phenomenon that grew in the company of my childhood friends. When we were in the same wavelength, sharing the same imaginative visions of being witches or steering a pirate ship. We fed off of each other’s energy and fueled each other’s energy.

I tried writing a song about these feelings and memories. Here is a video from one of our first attempts playing the song live. Right now its called, ‘Best Friend,’ but I’m working on the recording so everything is subject to change! (things can get crazy when it comes to recording 🙂 ) I dedicate the song to all of my good friends who I grew up with. Man we have sure learned a lot of lessons together! I’m so happy to have music as a channel through which to express these childhood memories.

 

Lyrics

Writing Lryics: Accept the ideas that hit you!

Since diving into music making I’ve also become a bigger music fan. This could be indicated by the correlation between the decrease of netflix movies and increase of musician/producer interviews watched on my computer. (trying to keep my math skills fresh here!)

I enjoy watching interviews of my favorite artists explaining their creative processes behind songs and albums and I wanted to write a ‘Top 5 List’ type of blog entry to summarize the key writing methods I’ve observed or practiced.

The thing is, my list of 5 kind of ended up at something around 20! Can you really sum up such a dynamic and creative process in only 5 key points? I concluded that each lyric writing technique deserved to be its own entry 🙂 So here is the first tip:

Accept the ideas that hit you!

My husband will sometimes jump out of bed when we’re falling asleep, grab his guitar and the i-touch I got him for Christmas, and fumble around the room in the dark exclaiming “I’ve gotta record this idea before I forget it!” I used to laugh at him when this happened, but now that I’m working on music, I find myself doing the same thing…

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat Pray Love, explores this phenomenon in her 2009 TED talk, ‘Your Elusive Creative Genius.’ Is it some kind of genius that strikes us with noteworthy ideas when we are least expecting them? Well not exactly genius the way we define it today, but more like an ancient version of the word. Gilbert explains how the ancient Romans identified a genius as a divine spirit that mysteriously provided artists with rich content and inspiration. Instead of the artist embodying the genius, something that Gilbert believes puts unnecessary pressure on artists today, the Romans envisioned a separation of the artist and the mysterious creative spirit.

For anyone interested in watching Gilbert’s talk, here is a link:

Now I had watched this talk for the first time about a year ago, and one thing I took from it was to be prepared.  Be prepared for your ideas to hit you at anytime! Be it pen and paper, or cool trendy smart phone, grab them and record them when they strike! Capture them before they vanish back into the mysterious world they came from, whether its a genius spirit or the intricacies of your subconscious 🙂

About us

So what the heck is my blog about?!

In the most simple explanation, the purpose of my blog is to share the fun musical endeavors of The Rungs, an electronic indie pop band formed by my husband (Diwas) and me (Mandy). Let me give you a bite-size version of the back story:

My husband and I spent our first year together in a long-distance relationship while I completed college. He was a dedicated guitar player in a local rock band in upstate New York and I was studying plant science at the University of Delaware.  I was never quite fond of my college town (no offense Delaware!) and as soon as I graduated I loaded up my car and headed to New York to live with my ever so compatible dude 🙂

Now being a Florida native, in the very beginning of my first upstate New York winter I discovered I needed a serious indoor hobby. Something that could keep me busy while sitting next to the heater in thick warm socks from December to March…those long winter months!

With Diwas in and out of the house on band tours and practices, I took advantage of the rotating population of guitars in our living room. ‘Okay guitars, its you and me, lets do this!’ Diwas taught me basic scales and chord progressions, bought me a metronome and downloaded Reaper, a nice user-friendly recording software to my computer. At this point my little musically unexperienced brain was just like, ‘Wwwowww!!!&!#@$@!!!!!’ I thought that playing music at home was just the best thing ever and I pushed through my 9-to-5 plant-bio-lab-tech job with the thought in the back of my head, “I can’t wait to get home and plant myself in the living room with a guitar!!!” I spent evenings recording layers of guitar on top of each other (You can only imagine how awkward the first recordings sounded), somehow became obsessed with the White Stripes,  and for reasons I will explain in a future blog post I started singing.

About a year after this newfound hobby (or should I say lifestyle?), Diwas organized a Birthday Bash for me at a local venue. We played a few songs together and it was a blast of a bash! We got such a great response from friends that we continued to play together around town. Eventually we needed a name, and being the clever devil he is, Diwas dubbed us The Rungs.

Oh what a fateful night that Birthday Bash was! …as you can see in the dark fuzzy cell phone image provided by my sister… How long we’ve come since then!

at delilah's

Fast forward to today: I’m boiling over with excitement about music and I needed a place to log and share this overflow of musical energy! I must admit I was a little hesitant at the thought of starting a blog, not really knowing what to write about or how to organize my pages. For the past few weeks I’ve been dipping my toes in and slowly swishing around the WordPress waters.  Already I’ve had a chance to visit some really cool blogs by very creative people! I’m discovering new music that others are sharing,  found some other great bloggers to follow, annnd I have more ideas about what pages to add. So blah blah blah enough about me and Thank You WordPress! I’m ready to get blogging 🙂